I’m having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday’s story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any. The issue here is whether it’s appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he’s a… Continue reading Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis
Category: In the News
Scientist Cleared, Process Unclear
The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else has been able to replicate them.… Continue reading Scientist Cleared, Process Unclear
Science Journalism Awards
Via EurekAlert, the American Association for the Advnacement of Science has announced the 2006 winners of their science journalism awards. Most of the written pieces are available online, so if you’re looking for science-y things to read, this could be a good source of material. None of the winners are bloggers, and there’s no blogging… Continue reading Science Journalism Awards
Cognitive Dissonance
There’s an interesting story in the New York Times this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology [Marcus Ross’s] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky,… Continue reading Cognitive Dissonance
New Developments in Inscrutable Chemistry
Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that: Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to — make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins… Continue reading New Developments in Inscrutable Chemistry
Pound Foolish
President Bush’s budget request for next year has been released. Surprising approximately no-one who has followed current events over the last seven years, it’s a mixed bag for science: President Bush rolled out a 2008 spending plan Monday that disappointed advocates for scientific research, even as it called for hefty increases for several key programs… Continue reading Pound Foolish
The Problem in a Nutshell
Via Eurekalert a poll of American attitudes toward science confirms that people are a little confused about the whole science thing. I think the most concise desription of the problem is in the second sentence: Most (87%) rate being a scientist as one of the most prestigious careers, yet 75% can’t name a living scientist.… Continue reading The Problem in a Nutshell
The New York Times Steals Our Ideas?
An article came through my RSS feeds yesterday that looked for all the world like the New York Times was copying our Basic Concepts idea. Labelled as “Basics,” it promised to provide a general discussion of the concept of time. “You bastards!” I thought. The actual article by Natalie Angier isn’t all that similar to… Continue reading The New York Times Steals Our Ideas?
Physics News of the Day
A couple of quick stories off Physics Web: First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to “entangle” six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled… Continue reading Physics News of the Day
Annals of Wishful Thinking
Over at Page 3.14, Katherine highlights a Psychology Today article about the different approaches young men and women have to dating. It’s more or less what you expect, but for one eye-popping sentence (emphasis added): [New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey] Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than… Continue reading Annals of Wishful Thinking